Fish the Cat

July 17, 2025, 5:54 PMJuly 17, 2025, 6:15 PM Chill Killin' It

It's fun that a meals can vary by orders of magnitude in price without being objectively better or worse

— Misha (@drethelin) July 17, 2025

One of the best meals I’ve had in my life was catfish I caught myself on a cane pole (yes, it can be done) that I made myself, with the fish gutted and cleaned by me as well, cooked by my grandma, with some potatoes and squash from my grandpa’s garden on the side.

Total cost (not including time): Approximately $0.35 in today’s dollars for the oil and power.

That fish was only 30 minutes out of one of the cleanest rivers in Florida and combined with my gran’s Southern-style cooking it was beyond glorious. It’s one of those meals that I sit around and reminisce about idly sometimes.

I’ve had $100+ meals that weren’t even 1/10 as good as that.

Decline Sign

July 17, 2025, 5:05 PM Chill Regular-ass Post

Britain is a broken civilization https://t.co/pzSmYDlmR5

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) July 17, 2025

I’ve been there recently. It is in obvious decline. It just feels shabby, and is much worse than even a few years ago.

Lasering

July 17, 2025, 2:46 PMJuly 17, 2025, 5:06 PM Chill Amusing

To destroy the earth (overcome its gravitational binding energy) with a space laser, you’d need around 375 trillion petawatts over 10 minutes.

That’s about 1,000x the total output of the sun over the same timeframe. If you could focus 100% of the sun’s output energy on earth, it’d take about 7 days to destroy the planet.

Just so you know.

The ‘Sition

July 17, 2025, 1:50 PM Chill Evil

FTM transitioners find out right quick how lonely and isolated the lives of most men are, and how often having any emotion as a man causes women to mercilessly attack you.

Crashes

July 17, 2025, 11:39 AMJuly 17, 2025, 11:40 AM Chill Regular-ass Post

It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realize things about your family and events therein till so much later in life.

When I’d just turned four my mom and I got into a serious car accident. She claimed the brakes didn’t work when she’d applied them. The car rolled over three times and came to a violent stop deep in a farmer’s field. I barely remember the wreck¹; that’s what I was told later. The old Vega sat in the yard after for years so I got to observe the destruction. The car was mangled. It’s amazing anyone survived. The cabin was crushed and it looked like it’d been stomped by a dinosaur. But I walked away without a scratch on me. My mom wasn’t quite so lucky and was in a wheelchair for a few weeks with some sort of pelvic strain but was otherwise fine.

But there’s something strange about it, I now realize. There were no other cars involved and the day was clear and sunny. There were no witnesses and the stretch of road was completely straight. My mom was also not an aggressive driver and was not prone to road rage.

What I do know about my mom, though, is that she really did not like being a mother and had attempted suicide later in life several times.

And here’s another thing: my dad rebuilt that car nearly from scratch. Also, he was a great mechanic. There’s no chance the brakes failed. Just none. His work was quality and the only way they would’ve failed is if someone had cut the brake lines.

What I think happened now, looking back after all these years, is that my mom decided she wanted to opt out of being a mother and me being alive and crashed that car on purpose. Except it didn’t work. We both lived. It probably changed her tune on dying, at least for a while, that brush with death.

Now, I do not know that my mom intended a murder-suicide. It’s just a guess. But given the evidence and knowing what I know about my mom, I’d bet on it. It’s far more likely than not.

Mainly I remember the paramedics checking me over right after. One was a really kind woman who made me laugh at something.

Pulp Up

July 17, 2025, 4:33 AMJuly 17, 2025, 4:41 AM Chill Movies

I know it makes me an Evil and Bad Man in the eyes of many women, but the dialogue in Pulp Fiction is just so spotless. It’s an unrelenting stream of the most brilliant patter written for film.

I think I know why there is such deep hatred for Pulp Fiction among so many women¹. That’s because it is probably the most masculine movie ever made. And I don’t mean the jock-y frat boy masculinity many men (and women) mistake for masculinity. No, I mean, it’s all about and based on how the masculine psyche actually functions. Exaggerated a little, sure, as all movies are. But basically correct.

Many women say to men, “We want to see how you really are.” Or, even more ludicrously, “I want to be treated just like a man.”

And to this I say:

1. No you don’t.
2. No, you really really, really don’t.

Pulp Fiction demonstrates raw masculinity and its concern for power structures, the casualness of violence in many men’s worlds, and that nearly all men care far more about what you actually do rather than what you say, or claim, or how you look, or seem to be. This is very different than how women relate, which is more often based on social presentation and though it involves just as much (arguably more) competition, their terms of the social contract are much more subsumed in obfuscation and plausible deniability.

So I can understand why women strongly dislike the movie. It must be for many of them like watching a scrambled film in a foreign language where scary people do bad things for unclear reasons. I would not like that either, to be fair.

Though not all women hate the work. A friend of mine was goofing around with the remote in a hotel room and turned the TV on. Pulp Fiction happened to be playing and she sat rapt watching it. “I’d forgotten how damn good this movie is,” she said.